One of our favorite pastimes over winter break is to play Taboo, a popular board game from Milton Bradley.Â Billed as “The Game of Unspeakable Fun”, Taboo is a spoken word game that involves trying to get your team to guess a secret word without using any of five clue words specified as “taboo”.Â How, for example, would you describe the word kitten without using the words meow, cat, purr, furry, or animal?Â As a player gives clues, he is constantly monitored by a member of the opposing team; if he makes any mistakes, he is unceremoniously “buzzed” and a point is deducted from his team’s score.

There are many ways to succeed in Taboo.Â Hand gestures, sound effects, and “sounds like” clues are prohibited, butÂ legal clues can consist of suggestive sentences, song lyrics, fill-in-the-blanks phrases, or even one-word hints.Â Here’s an example: How would you suggest the word diamond to your team if you couldn’t say baseball, carats, ring, jewel, or engagement?Â Here are some possibilities:

“They’re forever…”

“Hope is a huge one…”

“The World Series is played here…”

“Some are found in the rough…”

“Rolex makes gold ones…”

Sara’s clue for “Paul Revere”:“It’s the GUY!Â The GUY!”

My friends and I play Taboo a lot.Â Our games extend late into the night and often consume the entire deck of 504 cards.Â You might say that we have evolved Taboo playing to an art form.Â If I say aquatic animal, my teammates won’t say fish, they’ll say barracuda.Â Why?Â Because they know that there is no fish card, but there is a card with the word barracuda.

Most people accuse us of memorizing the cards, which isn’t really fair.Â We don’t try to memorize the cards; we’ve just played so frequently that we start to remember them.Â The effective result is that we’ve established clues for nearly every card.Â If there were a professional Taboo tournament, I think that my friends and I would be serious contenders for the world championship title.Â If I say film, my teammates will immediately name Citizen Kane, Alien,and Blade in rapid succession, since those are the only three film titles contained in the Taboo deck.Â Mention anything to do with Russia, and they’ll spout off Sputnik, Red Square, and Glasnost — the only three Taboo cardsÂ related to this subject.Â Playing Taboo at this level of expertise makes for some interesting games; the problem is that nobody wants to play with us anymore.Â One night we gave our opponents a 100-point handicap — and then lost by only one point.

“Gay people come …
of the closet”

Blackjack dealers derive almost no thrill from a game of blackjack.Â They’ve memorized the best course of action for every possible hand, so what is a game of skill for many has become for them a game of chance.Â The same could be said of us and Taboo.Â Once you’re familiar with all of the cards, the game play becomes somewhat mechanical.

That’s why we need your help.Â I’ve created a system that allows you to easily create new Taboo cards for us to use.Â Click here to give it a try.

question for you: would you say using the word “liquid” for describing “liquor” is allowed? It was not one of the taboo words. And, how about “clean” if the word was “tissue” but one of the taboo words was “Kleenex?” We had huge arguments over these words… what do you think?

WTF, share the wealth already! Or if you want to make money, start up a page that gives you ad revenue and gives us at least pieces of the data base… But you have it and we want it, so figure out a way to make us all happy!

Hi everyone,
I’ve been meaning to make some improvements to the database, including a “print cards” feature. I’ve received many similar requests over the years. Perhaps I’ll get around to improving the Taboo database one of these days, but in the meantime, here is a link where you can print out all of the cards with an average rating of 2 or greater:

Hi Monzy,
Did you take down the Print cards feature? It was working a few days ago and I was looking forward to using it tomorrow and printing it today but am getting the message “Object Not Found”
Thanks!

Hi Monzy,
I was wondering if I could have access to your taboo card database. I am planning on developing software that would take any word you enter, and generate clue words. This would be done by using statistical machine learning techniques to infer some underlying relationships between the key word and the clue words for preexisting taboo cards, with the aid of huge bodies of text that contain those key words, thesauri and dictionaries, wikipedia, and other sources. Perhaps we could collaborate some how? I am a taboo fanatic as well, and would like to have some way of being able to play a completely *new* game every time.
-Taylor

dunno if it was Monzy, but wordban.com sells additional “Taboo” cards in PDF format. I’m probably gonna try them out.
Maybe we should try to set up a public database that everyone can use. I was wondering if Monzy was sued by Hasbro or something and therefore took the link offline. Would be nice to get a short feedback on this, since there are still people looking for it 🙂

Thanks and best regards,
Alex

PS: I’m gonna play English taboo cards, so if you run out of cards, you could play the German or French cards, haha!